TITLE: The Making of a Straight-Ticket Society
https://www.governing.com/politics/the-making-of-a-straight-ticket-society
EXCERPTS: When President Richard Nixon won landslide re-election as a Republican in 1972, carrying every state but one, he was dealing with an alignment of 31 Democratic governors. A half-century later, there are only eight governors from the party that lost the presidential vote in their states. There are 99 legislative chambers in this country, and only a handful of them are controlled by their state’s losing party in the presidential voting. In 2022, only six states voted for different parties for the U.S. Senate and for governor.
Back in the 1990s, at a time when the split-ticket era was drawing to a close, two distinguished political scientists, Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball, wrote a convincing book explaining that voters didn’t split their tickets because they preferred divided government but because they were seeking out centrist candidates wherever they could find them. Today we have just about stood that theory on its head: Centrism doesn’t matter — partisan affiliation is what matters. And the winners are more often ideologues than pragmatists in the middle.
The question is why. There’s no one magic-bullet explanation. Perhaps the leading candidate is the “big sort” theory, first propounded by the journalist Bill Bishop in 2008. Bishop argued that more than in any previous period of American history, we are clustering together with our social and political soulmates rather than living in communities of diverse ideological makeup. Residents of liberal Austin, Texas, Bishop’s hometown, settled down among neighbors who thought and voted the way they did. The same was true of residents of conservative exurban territory all over the country. So Austin had become straight-ticket Democratic territory. Rural West Texas remains uniformly conservative and Republican. Further research concluded that most big cities produced such lopsided Democratic majorities that their electorates were wasting votes that would have been more valuable in more diverse constituencies.
The big sort plays into the hands of gerrymandering mapmakers, for whom it is relatively easy to draw districts that cluster voters essentially in single-party enclaves, to the benefit of the party drawing the lines. Since the districts nearly all tilt heavily to one party or the other, the action is all in the primaries, and there is relatively little general-election competition. A state may as a whole be divided relatively closely between the parties, as are, for example, Wisconsin and North Carolina, but the districts within them are solid straight-ticket enclaves when it comes to voting in both state and federal elections.
But there is more to this than the big sort and gerrymandering. Even statewide voting has generally gone in bifurcated directions, with one party or the other winning by margins much larger than existed a generation ago. This year there will be elections for governor in 11 states, and only a small handful of them stand any chance of being competitive. In the rest, the voting will be either straight-ticket Democratic or straight-ticket Republican.
As many plausible political explanations as there may be for our epidemic of straight-ticket voting, it would be foolish to deny that it also reveals the cultural tribalism that has taken root in American society since this century began. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 drew upon resentments among residents of rural and small-town America, in the South and in the Midwest, against the perceptions that a liberal bicoastal elite had stacked the deck against them, leaving their communities helpless against the depredations of global capitalism and unwanted immigration. And it left coastal liberals increasingly convinced that middle America was a cultural enemy. That tribalism has spilled over into elections at the state and local levels, leaving one-party politics as the norm in the vast majority of American constituencies.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, American politics was burdened by a straight-ticket tribalism perhaps even more intense than the current one. Southern Democrats were embittered at the Yankee values and culture that had upended their social world. Northerners saw southerners as unreconstructed rebels who had tried to tear the Union apart, and nearly succeeded. It was impossible for a Republican to win an election in Mississippi. It was almost as rare for a Democrat to win statewide in Pennsylvania. Regional inequality was rampant, and it was in many ways a tribal issue.
And yet by the second decade of the new century, a bipartisan consensus had developed that made it possible for American government to attack the glaring inequities of the economic system. That’s what made it possible for Theodore Roosevelt to govern as a Republican reform president and for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, for all his personal faults, to soften the inequities of the tariff, enact new regulation of predatory capital and create a Federal Reserve banking system. We didn’t conquer the tribalism of the era’s politics, but we overcame it.
TITLE: Dealing with election anxiety? A psychiatrist explains how to channel your fears and break out of tribal thinking.
https://thefulcrum.us/bridging-common-ground/election-anxiety
EXCERPT: As humans, we have a strong tendency to form group affiliations, whether based on national, ethnic, religious, sports, school or other social connections. People care more strongly for their own group members. Researchers have found that areas of the brain involved in empathy are more active when people see, for example, a member of their own college getting hurt versus someone from a rival college.
Tribal tendencies are not biologically tied to a specific racial, ethnic or national identity. Rather, all people are born with a desire to seek affiliation with the familiar.
Tribalism can strengthen in the face of a perceived external threat. Danger from outside can make you both paranoid about “others” not in your group and more trusting of your tribemates and tribe leaders.
This instinct is not necessarily bad. Tribalism has helped humans survive as a species by fostering the unity necessary to fend off an invading tribe, predators or natural disasters.
Leaders and media know how to exploit our tribalism to circle the wagons. They can trigger the tribal tendency in an effort to motivate people to avoid or attack the other side and keep donating, voting and watching their own side’s cable news.
For most media outlets in the U.S., like all corporations, revenue is the top priority. What matters most to them is the number of hours you watch, scroll and click. Science shows that emotions, especially negative ones, grab attention; fear makes people stick around.
Media organizations on both sides of the political spectrum recognize that negative news keeps the audience engaged. Whichever news channel you watch, when was the last time you turned away happy, energized and peaceful? More often you end up feeling the whole world is going down in flames.
During election season, these dynamics intensify as politicians seek cash and votes, and the media capitalizes on the opportunity to sell more ads.
TITLE: As political ad spend faucet opens, CTV media stands to be a major winner
https://digiday.com/media-buying/as-political-ad-spend-faucet-opens-ctv-media-stands-to-be-a-major-winner/
EXCERPT: According to MediaRadar data shared with Digiday, the dueling presidential campaigns and their respective allies had already spent $385 million as of Aug. 8 this year, and have scheduled a further $322 million in ad buys. The Democrats, thus far, are the bigger spenders.
More recently, in the second quarter of 2024, political ad spend was pegged as being almost 35% higher than in the same period during the 2020 election cycle, according to Operative STAQ, an ad management company. The firm’s spending data showed that ad spend from just one conservative political action committee, Americans for Prosperity, was up 77% in the second quarter compared with 2020.
“We’re already seeing a massive uptick this year compared to 2020 at the national level,” said Sarah Levitt, senior director of marketing at Operative.
The benefits are being seen across categories. Revenues at The Washington Post are up, for example. The week President Joe Biden stepped aside from the race, The Post recorded its best commercial week of the year, without citing specific figures, according to an email that recently appointed CEO Will English sent to staffers.
Other news organizations have also seen political spend begin to rise, according to Jason Taylor, chief sales officer at Gannett, which owns USA Today and hundreds of local newspapers. “There’s a return to us in political buying now,” he said, without sharing exact sales figures. “Historically, those buys have been local or late-cycle. So to see this action that we’re seeing now early is really encouraging.”
According to data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact, the competing presidential campaigns and their respective supporters collectively spent $182.1 million between July 22 and Aug. 11.
In light of the political dramas of the last six weeks, Pia Carusone, managing director of political consulting firm SKDK, told Digiday she had been recommending clients focus on cable TV (CTV). “In major news moments, your cable news is going to be pretty big. We’ve actually been pushing dollars there.” she said.
Still, political spending often ramps up as the polling booths beckon. Per AdImpact, before he canceled his re-election bid, President Biden’s campaign spent $150 million between January 2023 and April 2024 — and another $150 million between mid-April and July of this year alone.
And the lack of a close contest in each party’s presidential nomination process had actually held back campaign spending, according to Tyler Goldberg, political strategy director at media agency Assembly.
“The GOP presidential primary was faster and cheaper than we expected,” he said. It’s unlikely the July news cycle has compensated for the uncontested primaries, and Goldberg said Assembly’s estimates for the entire electoral cycle (roughly $12 billion) remain unchanged.
With the bulk of 2024’s total political ad spending yet to occur — Kevin Fisher, [The Trade Desk’s general manager] suggested that 65% of total estimated spend would be held back until the final eight to 10 weeks leading up to the election — it’s unclear how much might end up going toward CTV.
What is clear is that political advertising is catching up with the CTV opportunity identified by brand advertisers. “We virtually all have some sort of connected device in our home. The reality is that eyeballs and behaviors have shifted,” [ComScore’s chief commercial officer Steve] Bagdasarian said.